


Try

by zombolouge



Series: Zom's Tumblr Prompts [2]
Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Bittersweet, Cole wants to help, Drabble, Feelings, Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-14
Updated: 2015-10-14
Packaged: 2018-04-26 07:50:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4996561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zombolouge/pseuds/zombolouge
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tumblr Prompt: Cole walks silently through Skyhold, unable to sleep because what is sleep to a being from the Fade, and hoping to help. A soldier was having nightmares about the demons surrounding him. Cole leaves a bit of bread and a warm drink beside his bed and gently wakes him. The small comfort helps. He continues to the infirmary and the stables and the towers and then finds the Inquisitor. He pulls the covers back on, wishing he could dull the ache of their hand. He would have to find some other way...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Try

**Author's Note:**

> I rather liked this prompt. While this piece is relatively short, at least for me, I am pretty happy with it all the same. The Inquisitor has been left ambiguous, but I was pretty obviously thinking of Autumn :p ENJOY.

Pain, pulsing, parting…he could feel it flooding her veins like water from a well, each time the mark stuttered to life it sent another wave of foreign magic washing over her. She shifted in the bed, the sheets tangled in her legs, exposing skin that was pale in the moonlight drifting in through the windows. She clenched her fist around the anchor, squeezing the muscles as though the pressure could relieve the ache, could smash it from her palm and ease her endless suffering.

She was strong and too stubborn during the day, as though the sun was a mask she could wear to hide away her truth. When she smiled she could almost convince him that there wasn’t any pain, that there wasn’t a tremor in her arm that shook her to the foundations of her soul. The others believed, because they couldn’t hear the tiny voice screaming inside of her head, the one she kept locked in chains, deep down inside. She burned bright like a falling star, and Cole was the only one who could see the flames eating away at the parts that made her whole. The mark was like a thread, pulling at the edges of everything that held her together, and she held on to the tattered remains of what she was and tried to believe that it was all still going to be okay.

It was worse on the other end of that thread. Cole tried not to listen to that end. As bad as it was to hear the agony in her mind, it was worse to hear the desperate roaring turmoil of the man that never wanted any of this. His heart beat like thunder on the wind, reverberating through the echoes of heartache in the air until it reached her and filled her. He was afraid to listen to the waves as they crested, for fear it would drown them all. Cole couldn’t tell if she could feel it or not, if she knew that it was _his_ keening that created her wounds, his light that fed her flicker. Part of him wanted to tell her, but if she didn’t already know, then the knowing wouldn’t help.

What would help? He watched her chest rise and fall as she slept, and he pondered the problem set before him. He wanted to reach out and take her hand, to pry apart the tension in her fingers and steal away the magic that was burning her alive. He could see the paths ahead of them, see all the things they did converging into a single point like rivers to the sea. Facing, fighting, falling…feeling all those decisions stack up against the tides of fate as they were all dragged into the undertow. They had been marching towards this path since before the breach had torn the sky, since before Cole had broken the rules to come through, since before any of them could remember. People who didn’t even have names anymore left red marks across the pages of history, and now those marks were bleeding through, soaking up the words that were meant for the parts written about other people. The whole world was about this one story, and all her hidden pain and false bravado was just another chapter in a tale that wasn’t hers.

But it could be. Cole knew it, although he was perhaps the only one. He knew it when he had known Solas for what he was, when he had seen the years wrapped around his heart like locks on a gilded door. He had known when he had watched those barriers dissolve away, when she had taken her smile and her nature and picked the locks, one by one finding places within him that were never supposed to exist. Cole had known something had changed when he had seen Solas crushed, again and again, every time he walked away from her. She had taken that book with the bleeding pages and written her name in brilliant ink, scrawled across the mess and the chaos a few lines that could only be hers. She could finish the story, she could write the ending, if she could overcome the odds piling up against them.

There were so many things against them. Time, fate, the past, the future. None of it worked in her favor, but Cole refused to believe that there wasn’t a chance. Maybe it was because he loved them too much, maybe it was because he always believed that there was a way to help. _Try_. She had taught him that. She had taught him that hopelessness was the only impossibility. There was always a way forward, always a chance to change the inevitable, and even if it didn’t happen, even if failure wrapped its fangs tight around their throats, at least they could meet the end knowing they never gave up. Cole knew now that it was the trying that made them heroes, not the victories or the bravery.

Cole reached forward and took her hand, and when his fingers made contact with the shimmering green in her palm he could feel the two hearts connected to the anchor, beating as one, his own heart an intruder in the delicate rhythm. She turned towards him without waking, her brow furrowed as her sleeping form registered the contact. Cole squeezed her hand and leaned down, speaking softly so as not to wake those still adrift in the fade.

“Keep trying.”

He let go of her hand and made his way down the stairs, slipping out of the room as quietly as the shifting shadows. He could feel her sleeping easily again, and he could feel the tether binding two hearts together holding a little stronger. It was good that they had found each other, that those ties held strong despite all the fractures forming in their souls. They would need that connection in the days to come.

Cole couldn’t do much. He couldn’t ease their pain, he couldn’t change the past, he couldn’t make the world reflect the truth that either of them wanted. But he _could_ make sure they remembered: remembered to love, remembered to need, and remembered to try.

**Author's Note:**

> Come find me on tumblr!
> 
> zombolouge.tumblr.com


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